Ad Buyers Dig Twitter Video; More Facebook Vulnerabilities

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes took the stand today during the federal antitrust trial to defend his company’s $85 billion sale to AT&T. His rationale for the merger? Without powerful data and distribution across mobile and streaming media, Time Warner was boxed into linear television. Bewkes spoke about two changes in the industry that have left Time Warner behind: internet streaming and the emergence of targeted digital advertising. Bewkes said targeted advertising in particular is “really bad for TV companies,” according to Variety. As always, Facebook and Google prove the convenient boogie men. Read more.

We Got A Live One

Although Twitter’s video consumption pales compared to that of Facebook and YouTube, advertisers are hungry to be more involved with its live news and media programs. Those partnerships include ad packages and in-program sponsorships with streaming news like the financial network Cheddar, Bloomberg’s 24-hour TicToc news channel and the BuzzFeed “AM to DM” morning talk show. “AM to DM” and TicToc average between 500,000 and 1 million daily viewers, according to Digiday. “While it may not be on the same scale of other platforms, Twitter is traditionally a way to reach an audience that’s engaging a bit differently,” says Jessica Richards, North America managing director for the Havas social agency Socialyse. More. And check out AdExchanger on how publishers are monetizing live news online.

Feeling Prime

Jeff Bezos disclosed in his annual Amazon shareholder letter on Wednesday that the company’s Prime loyalty program has passed 100 million global subscribers and accounted for more than five billion shipments in 2017. Last year was also the biggest yet for Amazon voice-enabled devices, with “tens of millions” sold. More at CNBC.

Login With Facebook?

The use of a single Facebook login across apps puts consumers at risk of unwanted data collection, according to a study by Freedom to Tinker. Third-party data trackers use login APIs to pull personally identifiable information like photos, user IDs and other public information from apps and track them across the web. The study identified seven third-party apps that “abuse websites’ access to Facebook user data” and one more that uses its own Facebook application to track users around the web and target them with ads without consent. The personality quiz leveraged by Cambridge Analytica used a Facebook login API, and similar scripts are embedded in 434 of the top 1 million websites. “When a user grants a website access to their social media profile, they are not only trusting that website, but also third parties embedded on that site,” the report said. More.

At Your Service

Apple is launching a subscription news product under Apple News with Texture, the magazine app it acquired in March. Apple hopes to generate more money from online content, Bloomberg reports. Where Apple News offers subscriptions on an individual basis, incorporating Texture’s $9.99 bundled subscription model could make Apple News function more like Apple Music and help the company hit its aggressive goal of $50 billion in services revenue by 2020. But the model could be difficult to pull off, as people aren’t as willing to pay for news subscriptions as they are for music and video. "If Apple launches this as a similar business to Texture, they likely won’t have many subscribers," said Gene Munster, an Apple analyst and co-founder of Loup Ventures. More.